Balder Ex-Libris - Sniegoski Stephen J.Review of books rare and missing2017-08-18T03:02:54+02:00urn:md5:c9a6cc40b646b8184eadcdd0220bb450DotclearSniegoski Stephen J. - The case for Pearl Harbor revisionismurn:md5:39e9366603a8a12d13ecef55de0cdc902012-08-13T15:38:00+01:002014-05-05T16:58:59+01:00Balder ExLibrisSniegoski Stephen J.JapanJewNorth AmericaRevisionismSecond World War <p><img src="http://www.balderexlibris.com/public/img/.Sniegoski_Stephen_J_-_The_case_for_pearl_harbor_revisionism_s.jpg" alt="" /><br />
Author&nbsp;: <strong>Sniegoski Stephen J.</strong><br />
Title&nbsp;: <strong>The case for Pearl Harbor revisionism</strong><br />
Year&nbsp;: 2009<br />
<br />
Link download&nbsp;: <a href="http://www.balderexlibris.com/public/ebook/Sniegoski_Stephen_J_-_The_case_for_Pearl_Harbor_revisionism.zip">Sniegoski_Stephen_J_-_The_case_for_Pearl_Harbor_revisionism.zip</a><br />
<br />
The prevalent view of World War II is that of the “good war”—a Manichaean conflict between good and evil. And a fundamental part of the “good war” thesis has to do with the entrance of the United States into the war as a result of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. According to this view, the cause of the war stemmed from the malign effort by Japan, run by aggressive militarists, to conquer the Far East and the Western Pacific, which was part of the overall Axis goal of global conquest. Japan’s imperialistic quest was clearly immoral and severely threatened vital American interests, requiring American opposition. Since American territory stood in the way of Japanese territorial designs, the Japanese launched their sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. Although the Roosevelt administration had been aware of Japanese aggressive goals, the attack on Pearl Harbor caught it completely by surprise. To the extent that any Americans were responsible for the debacle at Pearl Harbor, establishment historians, echoing the Roosevelt administration, blamed the military commanders in Hawaii for being unprepared. A basic assumption of the mainstream position is that given the Japanese bent to conquest, war with the United States was inevitable. As mainstream historians Gordon W. Prange, Donald M. Goldstein and Katherine V. Dillon put it: “nothing in the available evidence... indicates that they (the Japanese) ever planned to move one inch out of their appointed path, whatever the United States did about it.” There was nothing the United States could do to avert war short of sacrificing vital security interests and the essence of international morality. A small group of revisionist investigators have disputed this orthodox interpretation at almost every turn. Revisionists argue that, instead of following an aggressive plan of conquest, Japanese moves were fundamentally defensive efforts to protect vital Japanese interests. And instead of seeing the United States simply reacting to Japanese aggression, as the orthodox version would have it, the revisionists see the United States goading the Japanese—by aiding China (with whom Japan was at war), military expansion, quasi-secret alliances, and economic warfare—to take belligerent actions. Finally, some revisionists go so far as to claim that Roosevelt had foreknowledge of the attack on Pearl Harbor but refused to alert the military commanders in order to have a casus belli to galvanize the American people for war. These revisionists see the effort as part of Roosevelt’s effort to bring the United States into war with Germany—the so-called “back-door-towar” thesis. Revisionism began before the end of World War II and reflected the views of the non-interventionists who had opposed American entry into the war. Prominent figures in the revisionist camp include: Charles Beard, Harry Elmer Barnes, George Morgenstern and Charles C. Tansill in the 1940s and 1950s; James J. Martin and Percy Greaves in the 1960s and 1970s; and more recently John Toland and Robert B. Stinnett. And some writers have accepted parts of the revisionist position but rejected others. The idea that American foreign policy provoked the Japanese into more belligerent actions, for example, has gained more adherents than the view that President Roosevelt intentionally allowed the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor. This essay, however, will not present a historiographical discussion of the revisionist literature bringing out the similarities and differences of the various revisionist authors’ writings. This has been done elsewhere, most notably by Frank Paul Mintz in his Revisionism and the Origins of Pearl Harbor. This essay will try to elucidate the major revisionist themes and to show their validity. In short, this essay hopes to provide what its title proclaims: “The Case for Pearl Harbor Revisionism.” THE CAUSES OF JAPANESE EXPANSIONISM Revisionists have focused on the underlying causes of Japanese expansionism in an effort to counter the mainstream view of the nefarious nature of Japanese policy. As Frank Paul Mintz writes: The revisionists demonstrated—and quite compellingly in some cases--that it makes for a poor historical interpretation to condemn Japan without coming to grips with the strategic, demographic, and economic problems which were at the root of Japan’s—not to mention any nation’s—imperialism. Revisionists emphasize that the Japanese had vital economic and security interests in China. Lacking in natural resources, Japan had especially depended upon foreign markets. Thus, access to China became absolutely essential to Japan’s economic well-being when, with the onset of the Great Depression, most industrialized countries established nearly insurmountable trade barriers. Instead of being an aggressor, Japan had been essentially satisfied with the status quo in China at the start of the 1930s, but as the decade progressed, the forces of Chinese communism and nationalism threatened Japanese interests in China. “It seemed to Tokyo,” Charles C. Tansill wrote, “that Japanese interests in North China were about to be crushed between the millstones of Chinese nationalism and Russian Bolshevism.” The revisionists portray the Japanese interests in China as similar to American interests in Latin America. As Anthony Kubek writes: The United States had its danger zone in the Caribbean and since the era of Thomas Jefferson, every effort had been to strengthen the American position and to keep foreign nations from establishing naval and military bases which would threaten American security. So Japan regarded Manchuria. Japan followed this natural policy and attempted to practice it with reference to the lands that bordered upon the China Sea. Korea, Manchuria, and Inner Mongolia were essential pillars of her defense structure. While the establishment interpretation emphasizes that the Japanese incursion into China was a violation of Chinese territorial integrity, the revisionists point out that the United States was highly selective in applying this standard. During the inter-war period, the Soviet Union had converted Outer Mongolia into a satellite and secured de facto control over Sinkiang, yet the State Department never protested Moscow’s violations of Chinese sovereignty. And Japanese actions in China were, in part, taken as defensive measures against the growing threat of Soviet Communism. Looking beyond the moral and legal aspects, revisionists maintain that Japanese interests in China did not portend further aggression into Southeast Asia or threaten vital American interests. Rather, American actions—aid to China, military expansion, and economic sanctions—purportedly intended to deter Japanese aggression actually served to induce such aggression into Southeast Asia and ultimately led to the Japanese attack on American territory. This is not to say that there were not extremist, militarist elements in Japan who sought military conquest. But in the immediate pre-Pearl Harbor period, the Japanese government was run by more moderate elements who sought to maintain peace with the United States and who were undermined by American intransigence. <strong>...</strong></p>Sniegoski Stephen J. - The Transparent Cabalurn:md5:6b77032064ebab5bb13c7a6d595da7cf2012-07-12T17:39:00+01:002014-05-07T21:45:31+01:00Balder ExLibrisSniegoski Stephen J.IranIraqIsraëlJewNorth AmericaSyria <p><img src="http://www.balderexlibris.com/public/img/.Sniegoski_Stephen_J_-_The_Transparent_Cabal_s.jpg" alt="" /><br />
Author&nbsp;: <strong>Sniegoski Stephen J.</strong><br />
Title&nbsp;: <strong>The Transparent Cabal The Neoconservative agenda, war in the middle east, and the national interest of Israël</strong><br />
Year&nbsp;: 2008<br />
<br />
Link download&nbsp;: <a href="http://www.balderexlibris.com/public/ebook/Sniegoski_Stephen_J_-_The_Transparent_Cabal.zip">Sniegoski_Stephen_J_-_The_Transparent_Cabal.zip</a><br />
<br />
Stephen Sniegoski’s study The Transparent Cabal: The Neoconservative Agenda, War in the Middle East, and the National Interest of Israel is a meticulously prepared and strenuously argued brief against the neoconservatives’ continued influence over American foreign policy. Although Dr. Sniegoski does not investigate all aspects of this pervasive influence on the Bush Two administration, he does focus methodically on the effects of the neoconservatives’ rise to power in terms of U.S. relations with the Middle East. What is most impressive about Sniegoski’s study is its rigorous demonstration of the persistence with which neoconservative “policy advisers” have pushed particular agendas, driven by their strident Zionism, over long periods of time. Indeed these activists have stayed with their agenda until both historic opportunities and their personal elevation have allowed them to put their ideas into practice. Sniegoski does not have to reach far to prove his case. As his documentation makes crystal (rather than Kristol!) clear, much of the evidence for his thesis is readily available, or has been at least alluded to, in the national press and in the published works of neoconservative celebrities. As a European historian, I have been struck by the resemblance between this situation and the way certain European statesmen before the First World War, who were eager for a showdown with a particular national enemy, kept climbing back into power in ruling coalitions, until they could carry out their purpose. This was true for both of the sides that went to war in the summer of 1914. It might be argued that the recent bestseller by John Mearsheimer and Stephen J.Walt, The Israeli Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, has pre-empted Sniegoski’s work, by making a wide readership aware of the machinations of the American Israeli Political Action Committee (AIPAC) and its neoconservative shock troops. These well-known professors of international relations, whom Sniegoski cites, have recently delved into the ways that the American Zionist lobby has colored and distorted American foreign policy in relation to the Middle East. Mearsheimer and Walt have documented (and this may be the most effective part of their presentation) the war of vilification that has been conducted against any politician who has questioned the U.S.’s “special relation” with Israel. Equally important, Norman Finkelstein, who paid for his investigative zeal with his academic career, has shown the way that AIPAC and its allies have played the double game of being allied to the pro-Zionist Christian right while attacking Christianity as “a major cause of the Holocaust.” And my own articles have provided further evidence of how neoconservatives have been particularly adept at playing both of these angles at different times. Nevertheless, Sniegoski has cut out for himself a less glamorous but historiographically valuable task, which is to detail exactly how the neoconservatives moved into a position to realize their purposes and, moreover, how closely their purposes dovetail with the foreign-policy aims put forth by the Israeli right since the 1980s and even earlier. Sniegoski performs these scholarly tasks while avoiding certain oversimplifications; and it might be useful to point out what he expressly does not do, because if the neoconservative press does decide to deal with his work, one can count on its efforts to misrepresent his arguments. Nowhere does Sniegoski suggest that the Israeli government controls its neoconservative fans in the U.S. – or even less that Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, Michael Ledeen, and other neoconservative presidential advisors have been Israeli agents. In fact Sniegoski points to cases in which American neoconservatives have been vocally unhappy with peace initiatives begun by or with military restraint exercised by actual Israeli governments. While neoconservatives have generally opposed the Israeli Labor Party as too soft on Israel’s Arab enemies, it has also scolded Likud premiers Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert when they have not met neoconservative standards of being tough enough with the Palestinians or with Hezbollah in Lebanon. Probably the ideal Israeli leader, from the neoconservative perspective, is Benjamin Netanyahu, for which one major reason is that this Likudnik hawk has spent considerable time in the U.S. and around the neoconservatives, and he slavishly imitates their rhetoric about Israel as a Middle Eastern advocate of “global democracy.” Another argument that Sniegoski never makes, and which should not be ascribed to him, is to identify the neoconservatives and their beliefs with the pursuit of Israeli interests alone. The author’s position is far more sophisticated and goes something like this: The neoconservatives bring with them a distinctive worldview, and in terms of their positions on American internal politics, one can easily fit them into a certain tradition of New Deal-Great Society American progressivism. Nor have the neoconservatives ever tried to hide this identification, or their huge differences with either small-government, isolationist Taft Republicans or with the anti-Communist interventionists grouped around William F. Buckley and National Review in the 1950s and 1960s. What has made the neoconservatives seem “conservative” has been primarily their role in foreign policy, as critics of détente with the Soviet Union and as hardliners on Israel. Their anti-Soviet posture helped the neoconservatives relate to the conservative movement that had been there before; nonetheless, once they took over that movement (which is the subject of my latest book), they turned a hardline Likudnik view of Middle Eastern affairs into a litmus test of who is or is not an “American conservative.” Finally, Sniegoski never suggests that the Israeli government pushed the U.S. into invading Iraq. What he does argue is that the neoconservatives, who played a decisive role in plunging us into that quagmire, were acting in harmony with what they perceived as the interests of the Israeli government and the position of the Sharon government. Nobody coerced President Bush into launching an unwise war; and if he were a more prudent and better-informed statesman, he would not have chosen to listen to Vice President Cheney and his neoconservative hangers-on about invading Iraq. Foreign states and domestic lobbies may agitate to get us to do questionable things internationally, but it is the duty of intelligent leaders to ignore such coaxing and threats. Nor does Sniegoski attach to the Israeli government any special quality of nastiness or deny that internally it is arguably a more civilized state than one might find among many of its Muslim adversaries. Israeli leaders are simply trying to advance the interests of their country, as they perceive them. What Sniegoski is challenging is the management of American foreign policy by extreme Zionists, who can never seem to make the proper distinctions between American and (their vision of) Israeli interests. Although my views of the plight of the Israelis is probably far more sympathetic than that of Dr. Sniegoski, I am appalled by the evidence he adduces of the activities of neoconservative “policy-advisors” in pushing the U.S. into conflicts they thought were “good for Israel.” The dogged, obsessive character of these efforts, some going back to blueprints for change constructed in the late 1960s, gives the lie to any view that the neoconservatives are only trying to help the Israelis on an ad hoc basis. Sniegoski’s research also illustrates the tremendous gulf between what the neoconservatives want for Israel and intend to have the U.S. government provide and what the Israeli public, when polled, thinks is necessary to achieve peace with the Palestinians. The neocons invariably seem more extreme, and the paper trail they have left behind about how the U.S. should advance “democratic” interests in the Middle East indicates something far less than even-handedness. The fact that the neoconservative press still denies what few Israelis would hesitate to acknowledge, that Palestinians were subject to ethnic cleansing in 1948, speaks volumes about Sniegoski’s subjects. Sniegoski also stresses the divergence between the bellicosity of neoconservative presidential advisors and the general lack of enthusiasm for the Iraq war expressed by American Jews. Whereas the general American population, according to a Gallup Poll conducted in February 2007, opposed the war by a margin of 56 to 42 percent, Jewish opposition to the war policy was as high as 77 percent. One must of course factor in that the vast majority of American Jews, despite their residual Zionism, are on the Democratic left; and since this war was started by a “rightwing” Republican, they are predictably opposed to it. But the question – unanswered, naturally – remains whether or not they would oppose it, if they saw it as being in Israel’s interest, or if it were started by Jewish liberal Democrat war-hawk Senator Joe Lieberman. Sniegoski is nonetheless correct to note that in the present circumstances Jewish “public opinion” seems far less war-happy than the policy pursued by the Zionist neoconservatives. In closing I would observe that this book compares favorably to the recent bestseller by Mearsheimer and Walt, although because of the author’s more modest professional position and because of the limited public relations funds available to Enigma, Sniegoski may never gain as much attention as these other critics for his scholarly efforts. His work covers many of the same themes as those found in The Israeli Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, but he covers them with more voluminous documentation. By the time the reader gets to the end of this volume, he is pleasantly overwhelmed with facts and citations that amply support Sniegoski’s argument. Moreover, unlike Mearsheimer and Walt, Sniegoski does not ascribe to this group “decades” of evil doing, and he also points out that the Zionist lobby is acting in a perfectly “American” way to carry out what it regards as reasonable goals. He shows how the neoconservatives rose to national prominence, taking over the American conservative movement while maintaining extensive contacts within the liberal establishment. From this springboard, members of this group eventually became government advisors in Republican administrations – and more particularly in the Bush II administration; and this leverage allowed them to carry out particular plans for reconfiguring the Middle East, which some of them had been working on for many years. The argument is thoroughly convincing, and Dr. Sniegoski, who is a trained practitioner of the historian’s craft, merits high praise for what he has produced. The history discussed in this book has not come to an end but belongs to an ongoing problem. Neoconservatives continue to have direct influence both in the Bush administration and with the leading contenders for the presidency. Rudolph Giuliani, the first leading Republican candidate, had his campaign war chest filled up with donations from neoconservative funding sources, and his roster of advisors looked like a gathering of the editors and contributors to Commentary magazine. And neoconservatives have now become the major advisors to the Republican presidential nominee John McCain, who explicitly expresses their democratic universalism and hawkish foreign policy. Nor is the neoconservative influence on presidential politics limited to Republicans. Such prominent neocon spokesmen as William Kristol and William Bennett initially eyed as a presidential candidate socially liberal Zionist hawk Joe Lieberman, and they have since adapted to circumstances by going from speaking of a Rudy-Lieberman dream team to having the Connecticut Senator on McCain’s ticket. Meanwhile, the New York Times’s token (neo)“conservative” David Brooks has heaped praise on Hillary, and a feature article in an issue of The American Conservative from late last year demonstrated that Hillary’s advisory staff is honeycombed with identifiable “neoliberals,” who bear a strong family resemblance to the neoconservatives. If any one of these neocon-preferred presidential candidates gets into the White House, the story told in this book will be only a prelude to a much greater national disaster. Therefore intelligent and patriotic Americans are urged to purchase, study, and talk about this important work. If Stephen Sniegoski can help to create the public awareness necessary to deal with the problem that he painstakingly examines, we might be able to rejoice that his book pointed to, and warned of, an ultimately avoidable future. <strong>...</strong></p>